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Soundwaves Uses Spotify To Recommend Your Holiday Destination

08 / February / 2019

The Yacht Week, the unique floating festival and travel experience of a lifetime, has launched Soundwaves, an app that analyses a user’s Spotify listening habits to recommend a destination and activities they would enjoy, then provides a personalised ’Sounds To Sail To’ playlist. Whether it is Croatia (multiple routes, including Ultra Festival experience), Greece, the Caribbean or Montenegro, each destination on The Yacht Week has its own pace and programmed activities, and a soundtrack to match, allowing Soundwaves to 'find the rhythm of your route’ based on a user’s music choices. The Yacht Week provides an unforgettable travel experience for around 12,000 guests a year, with around 1,500 yachts taking to the water, with music a central theme. The Yacht Week has invested heavily in music, developing ’the buzz boat’, a floating DJ booth powered by VOID Acoustics, featuring globally renowned DJs (Claptone was a headliner in 2018). The Yacht Week also works with local venues on each route to deliver huge parties and is committed to supporting up and coming artists alongside big names. Soundwaves is a natural step further; the first time a travel company has integrated music analytics to recommend a destination and activities based on a guest’s musical tastes. Connect to Soundwaves here: https://soundwaves.theyachtweek.com/.

Music and travel are intrinsically linked. Music provides an indelible association to a place or moment; a big holiday hit, a sunset tune, a road trip playlist. Soundwaves by The Yacht Week uses data provided through Spotify Connect to analyse a user’s listening habits against 370 behaviour points, scoring high on some and lower on others, with each point also indicating a certain affiliation to a specific route and activity. Analysis is based on Danceability (how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity), Energy (a perceptual measure of intensity and activity, including dynamic range, perceived loudness, timbre, onset rate, and general entropy), and Genre (the different styles of music), to create a profile, which allows Soundwaves to curate an individual trip. For example, if a user scores ‘high’ across danceability, energy and genres, Soundwaves may recommend the Croatia route with activities such as The Buzz Boat, Wakeboarding and The Yacht Week Run Club. However, a ‘low’ score will result in a different experience, such as a recommendation of Greece with Natural Bay Lunch Swims, Seaside Yoga Session and Sunset Dinner.

Once this recommended route has been selected, Soundwaves takes the user through the selection, with an explanation as to why each element was chosen. Finally each user receives a personalised ‘Songs To Sail To’ Spotify playlist that combines the Soundwaves playlist for the recommended destination, with tracks selected based on their own taste.

The Soundwaves concept is already proving popular. In its first week there have been over 20,000 sessions to the landing site and over 600 unique and personalised playlists created. The data shows an audience of music lovers, with 86% of users listening to a diverse range of genres. Based on the analytics, the Croatia Original Route is currently the most recommended, followed closely by the newly launched Dubrovnik Route.

The Yacht Week Director of Marketing & Technology, Will Weeks comments, “Music is such as important aspect of youth culture, and central to The Yacht Week experience. This year as we continue to build upon the programming of our events it’s only right that we bring music into how our customers discover, research and book with us. We’re proud to be the first travel brand utilising Spotify listening data in merchandising our product, and look forward to delivering this through our 2019 season."

Music is the soundtrack to our lives and our musical tastes influence our lifestyle decisions. Soundwaves by The Yacht Week recognises the important role of music, taking a data-driven approach to deliver a new level of personalisation and a unique travel experience.